Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian

Saturday, June 20, 2026--San Antonio

Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian was just the book I needed this week--a well written book among the short list of the top books of 2026 so far by the NY Times and one filled with hillarious banter that kept me laughing aloud.  It was so good that I started limiting how much I would read each day so the book would last longer.  It's the story of the two main stars of a 7-year-long-running series set in space.  The stars seem to hate each other and have been carrying on with bitchy bantering for the run of the show.  One of the actors is from a very wealthy family and suffers from anxiety and OCD.  The other had an alcoholic mother who left him and he ended up living in foster homes.  He suffers from a sense of abandonment and a fear of not ever being loved enough.  As the anxious character approaches the end of the season (intending to leave it to try to revive an award-winning serious career that he had before), he begins to realize that he will miss his co-star he has had so many intimate scenes with over the years.  The book covers the summer break between the 7th and the 8th (upcoming) season.  The characters find themselves interacting more and more together. And the reactions of the fans of the show on social media add a special (funny) spice to the story.  I'll leave the deatils to the readers.  I gave the book 5 stars out of 5 (agreeing with the NY Times).

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

Monday, June 15, 2026--San Antonio

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke has been among the most popular books of this year.  I read it only because it became available in unlimited supply from my library for one weekend--a download to my Kindle.  I cannot say that it was a pleasure to read it.  Why?  Because ALL of the characters except for Maeve, the delightful, happy, youngest daughter, were despicable people.  And my question is:  How can anyone find pleasure reading a story filled with such people?  The main protagonist is a woman who has grown up poor in a home with no father but has gotten a full-ride scholarship to Harvard.  She is a fundamentalist Christian, so being at Harvard is a challenge socially.  She meets and marries a man who has grown up in a wealthy family with national political ties.  Yet her husband is the youngest and the weekest of the sons in his family--spoiled rotten without any interest in applying himself to any type of real world task.  Because of this, the woman decides she must be the one to make their life work.  But problems develop and multiply.  She has to keep her husband happy by keeping him thinking he is as important to the endeavor as she is.  Her personality is mostly grim and demanding of others, so to be the social influencer she is becoming she must provide a false impression of her real self.  This book has all of the problems of the present times--corrupt politics, talk of a coming civil war, envy, jealousy, lying, cheating, broadcasts and social media "spinning" stories, etc.  I waded through the book to the end.  If I rate it on how pleasurable it was to read it, I would have to give it no more than 2 1/2 stars out of 5.  But this unpleasureable book was well constructed, so I will give it an overall rating of 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

Taiwan Travelogue by Thuang-Zi Wang, Translated by Lin King

Thursday, June 11, 2026--San Antonio

Taiwan Travelogue by Thuang-Zi Wang and translated by Lin King is a book with an interesting history.  It is based on a year of traveling and speaking in Taiwan in 1939  when it was a Japanese territory and the original author, a Japanese mainland woman kept detail journals of her experiences.  It was first published in the 1950s.  It has had several publications over the years which have been in Japanese, Mandarin, and now in English.  The English version won the National Book Award last year for best translated literature and it won the Booker International Prize this year.  Because it was based on the journals and because the author of those was fascinated by trying local foods, there are lots of details related to multiple-course meals included--so many that I started rushing through them.  The main story is about the slowly developing relationship between the Japanese mainland author and her assigned island-born Japanese female translator and guide of the same age and how the cultural structure of how Japanese people must interact and respond to each other in general and also between class levels created problems with acceptance and understanding between the two women.  There are many footnotes to explain types of foods and name differences between Mandarin and Japanese and between place names of the time and those of today so the reader can better follow the story if they want to go to a present-day map or have been to Taiwan and traveled around the country as I have done.  I enjoyed the story, but my rating is 3 1/2 stars out of 5 because of so many food details that take up maybe 30% or more of the text.

The News from Dublin by Colm Toibin

Wednesday, June 3, 2026--San Antonio

The News from Dublin by Colm Toibin is a collection of short stories that was just recently published.  I have read novels by him previously.  As usual, his writing is wonderful. Although the author is Irish (and lives in the USA), his stories in this collection take place in various locations in the world and represent different points in time.  The biggest problem I had was that I had not realized it was a collection of short stories.  So as I read the first, then the second, and moved to the third, I kept trying to figure out how those "chapters" were all going to eventually fit together.  But I double-checked and realized that each was its own short story.  I gave this collection a rating of 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

Friday, May 29, 2026--San Antonio

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell was longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.  It is a very detailed novel during about a period of days changed the life of a 45-year-old professor of poety (and former high school teacher),  Severe pain occurs in his belly.  Five days later the pain has not gone away and he heads to the Emergency Room at the local hospital.  Most of the book covers his experiences, interactions, and wandering thoughts during the 10-11 days at the hospital--at the emergency room on the first day and then in thein the Intensive Care Unit.  The protagonist had a dangerous situation related to a tear to the inner lining of his aorta and there were indications of inflamation that could be the cause.  Multiple teams of doctors were involved to try to search for the cause of the inflamation so they could treat it while they were giving him heavy doses of antibiotics intraveneously in hopes that they would take care of whatever the cause was if they could never noarrow it down through their lab tests, scans, etc.  The author is obviously a good writer, but the story goes into so much detail about the hospital experience and veers off at one point for many detailed pages about poety that I found myself wishing to move on.  I did start skipping pages about poety; the topic was not interesting to me and it had nothing to do with moving the story of his situation forward.  I often notice that an author is so interested in his specialty topic that he ends up writing too much about it in a novel--providing far more information than either the story needs or reader needs or wants.  In this case I, therefore, downgraded my rating to 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

All Them Dogs by Djamel White

Tuesday, May 36, 2026--San Antonio

All Them Dogs by Djamel White is set in an area of Dubin where people live in council houses, are poor, and where drug gangs operate by recruiting young teenagers to do their dirty work so that those running the gangs get rich and keep their hands clean.  Tony ran away to England for 5 years after a murder that would likely have been pinned on him.  He has just returned and has been recruited to be the right-hand man of one of the mid-level guys in the gang--a guy he remembers from being a year ahead of him in school.  But things have changed.  There are now factions wanting to break away from the main gang.  There's more heavy-handed deailings occurring and more murders.  And Tony is going to learn a lot of things he would rather not know and to remember something that he had blocked out of his mind from 5 years ago.  And the reader is going to know all long that Tony should have stayed in London.  He's too sensitive to be involved in this kind of life and has a secret about himself that should have caused him to stay gone.  It's an exciting book with lots of action that provokes lots of thinking on the part of a reader.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle

Friday, May 22, 2026--San Antonio

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle was named a top book of 2025.  It is science fiction dealing with an alternative concept of the afterlife.  (Another book I read previously, Under the Whispering Door, had a similar theme.)  In this book, a young man keeps having tastes show up in his mouth that are very detailed.  While working at a bar and serving a final customer of the night, he has the sensation of the taste of a drink.  He makes it and hands it to the man in front of him.  At the first sip, sparkles occur in the air that come together in a non-solid form but one that can communicate by voice.  It is the ghost of his lost wife.  They communicate with each other under he takes the last sip of the drink causing he to then disappear again.  Most of the tastes he gets like this are for food.  He tests a theory by trying to recreate them, but he doesn't know enough about cooking to do it exactly right, so he gets a job as a dishwasher in a nice restaurant and starts observing and learning from the cooks.  Eventually, he learns enough that he brings back an occasional ghost but not always.  When and why does it work?  Is he doing these people a favor by bringing back the ghosts?  Is he doing the ghosts a favor or creating a problem for them?  He approaches it all with an altruistc attitude of trying to help both people and ghosts.  But he is doing it still without complete understanding of the questions he had been asking himself--based instead on assumptions he is making.  And others who do not have altruistic attitudes become involved.  There is a grand climax with major aftereffects.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.